TY - GEN
T1 - Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Bitcoin Mixers (But Were Afraid to Ask)
AU - Pakki, Jaswant
AU - Shoshitaishvili, Yan
AU - Wang, Ruoyu
AU - Bao, Tiffany
AU - Doupé, Adam
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2021, International Financial Cryptography Association.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - The lack of fungibility in Bitcoin has forced its userbase to seek out tools that can heighten their anonymity. Third-party Bitcoin mixers use obfuscation techniques to protect participants from blockchain transaction analysis. In recent years, various centralized and decentralized Bitcoin mixing methods were proposed in academic literature (e.g., CoinJoin, CoinShuffle). Although these methods strive to create a threat-free environment for users to preserve their anonymity, public Bitcoin mixers continue to be associated with theft and poor implementation. This paper explores the public Bitcoin mixer ecosystem to identify if today’s mixing services have adopted academia’s proposed solutions. We perform real-world interactions with publicly available mixers to analyze both implementation and resistance to common threats in the mixing landscape. We present data from 21 publicly available mixing services on the deep web and clearnet. Our results highlight a clear gap between public and proposed Bitcoin mixers in both implementation and security. We find that the majority of key security features proposed by academia are not deployed in any public Bitcoin mixers that are trusted most by Bitcoin users. Today’s mixing services focus on presenting users with a false sense of control to gain their trust rather than employing secure mixing techniques.
AB - The lack of fungibility in Bitcoin has forced its userbase to seek out tools that can heighten their anonymity. Third-party Bitcoin mixers use obfuscation techniques to protect participants from blockchain transaction analysis. In recent years, various centralized and decentralized Bitcoin mixing methods were proposed in academic literature (e.g., CoinJoin, CoinShuffle). Although these methods strive to create a threat-free environment for users to preserve their anonymity, public Bitcoin mixers continue to be associated with theft and poor implementation. This paper explores the public Bitcoin mixer ecosystem to identify if today’s mixing services have adopted academia’s proposed solutions. We perform real-world interactions with publicly available mixers to analyze both implementation and resistance to common threats in the mixing landscape. We present data from 21 publicly available mixing services on the deep web and clearnet. Our results highlight a clear gap between public and proposed Bitcoin mixers in both implementation and security. We find that the majority of key security features proposed by academia are not deployed in any public Bitcoin mixers that are trusted most by Bitcoin users. Today’s mixing services focus on presenting users with a false sense of control to gain their trust rather than employing secure mixing techniques.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_6
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-64322-8_6
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85118931298
SN - 9783662643211
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 117
EP - 146
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 25th International Conference, FC 2021, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Borisov, Nikita
A2 - Diaz, Claudia
PB - Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH
T2 - 25th International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2021
Y2 - 1 March 2021 through 5 March 2021
ER -